Aspie Dad

Sometimes I really don’t know what to think or say whenever someone says something like, “even an autistic child feels that way, just like you or I.” Great Ghu, talk about objectifying a whole group of people, most likely including their kid. It really pisses me off when they have some sort of professional creds.

“Wow, do they really feel things? Even like emotions?” (/explitive deleted)

Actually, I have some really strong ideas about what to say or do when this happens. Legions of NT authority figures, however, have schooled me that many of those responses are ‘not appropriate.’ Heh. Now that I’m (more or less) an adult and definitely a father, I understand…

I don’t necessarily accept, but I do understand. I’m not sure that I can ever make it clear to them that I deeply understand how an autistic child feels, but that I have absolutely no idea what they are referring to with this ‘just like you or I’ crap. NTs can be unfathomable sometimes.

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I neglected to do this when it occured — I apologize…

We had the first meeting for Aspie Boy’s IEP back on May 18th and we left with things still unresolved. The institutional position was that he needed to either move on to a lower functioning program or get mainstreamed in Kindergarten next fall.

Aspie Mom (yes, it’s true…) and I agreed immediately that ‘they’ [them!] had forgotten that Aspie Boy missed the birthday cutoff by three weeks [edit: the cutoff to go to Kindergarten for 2006-07]. He is so large for being four and a half (height or weight is +3Σ/99 percentile; height/weight is 50 percentile) that everyone thinks he is six. Obviously this is also often a problem with the school personnel thinking he is regressing or lower functioning.

So we brought this up outside the meeting and within a day had agreement that he is doing fine and should stay just where he is for next year. (’Oh wait! He’s only FOUR! (nervous laughter) OH, oh. Umm, yes. Let’s not go with that plan, we’ll amend.’) If things continue as they have been, Aspie Boy should enter Kindergarten along with everyone else in a year [edit: during the 2007-08 school year]. Yea!

Otherwise we were going to take him out of the program because we’re trying to get him to ‘model up, not down’ [edit: and the program change would be contrary to those objectives].

I can only think of how different things would have been for me 40 years ago if there had been this kind of attention paid to what was going on. Que sera.

So despite what I/we suspect is some institutional pressure to move kids ‘out’, we’ve escaped the trend. For now at least.